Up until recently I've been hosting the forum alongside a number of other websites (including my business) all on a single hosting plan. Due to some bad code, crawler bots, and spammers, my hosting was overrun which in turn also shut down my business website. As a result I have moved all non-business websites to their own hosting plan. I've been hosting websites for a long time at no charge. Previously, my business was footing the bill for the hosting. Now that the bill is coming directly out of my pocket I'm asking all of my hosted website owners to chip in for a portion of the costs.

I've had a few people here offer up donations in the past but I have always declined. I don't like to ask for money but from this point on I won't turn away donations.

If you enjoy the forum and want to drop some change in the hat to help me offset the costs I would really appreciate it.

Ryan, DUDE (said in the most Labowski way), a huge thanks for your work. I'm sorry the internet assholes took down the business site, but you're right to separate the two and I realize that costs money. I'll work on the paypal thing.

I'm not looking to make any money here but it would be nice if it was self supporting. 979 @ $0.051 would be good. :) I'm sure a few of those accounts are spammers though, not sure you will get even a penny out of them.

I didn't want to bump this until I actually did sometime. I threw $20 in the pot (which is nothing, really). My experience in another group is that the majority of the readers and even posters don't contribute. That forum has a little symbol next to your name that indicates if you've donated. "Donator." (A good idea Ryan. I think it might bump up the donations.)

Also, I have a feeling that Ryan is quite talented so the upkeep of this site doesn't seem like much to him, but it does require time and skill. Hackers are talented and sites get attacked, so I urge people to throw something in the kitty.

Thank you Jay. You are not wrong. I don't know about talented but I have a fair bit of experience with websites and programming. Most of the time I do spend doing administration is spent filtering out spammers. The built in functions work marginally. I'd say about half of the registrants are junk accounts. I manually approve every registrant and if they are questionable I let them simmer for a week and then search the email address used. It seems to be a fair method. A few time a year I spend part of an evening to upgrade the forum software. In general the install is totally uneventful.

I will look into a sticker for doners. Great idea.

I'm also totally open to any additions or changes that would be beneficial for the site.

I have received couple few donations thus far. Thank you to those that have contributed. I am looking for a multiple rank mod but the search is not going well. There have been a couple rank mods setup for previous versions of the forum but nothing that is up to date for the current version and they all look to be abandoned. I may consider moving to another forum software in the future to something that is more popular.